In the spring of 1951, my family rode the great crest of post-war immigration from the Netherlands to Canada. My parents were in their mid-forties at the time; their seven children ranged in age from eleven to twenty.
After several fits and starts at trying to find our place in the new country, we finally settled in Clinton, Ontario.
During the first two months of the new year–with the commemoration of the life of Martin Luther King in January and Black History month in February–we have wonderful opportunities to celebrate the richness of African American history and heritage. Genealogists are fortunate to have bountiful resources available to them for researching African American family histories.
Get everything while you’re there,” was the advice I was given many years ago when I was planning a trip to a distant repository that had a large collection of unindexed original records. Since then, I’ve given many students the same advice in hopes of saving them a costly return trip for something they overlooked. Neither my long-ago advisor nor I meant it literally of course.
American schoolchildren are taught that the “tall lady with the torch” represents freedom, but do people born into freedom truly appreciate its value? Those individuals who have come to the United States of their own volition understand its value in a very special way.
I started from East Bloomfield, Ontario County, New York, on the 6th day of December, 1825, with my pack on my back, bound for the territory of Michigan, with one hundred and fourteen dollars in bank bills in my pocket. I bent my course towards ‘the west’ by way of Buffalo, where I arrived on the 8th at evening.
For as long as I can remember, I have known that I was named for my great-grandmother, Breina, in the Ashkenazic Jewish tradition of naming a baby after someone deceased. I knew Breina had been my paternal grandfather’s mother. That’s all I knew.
Tombstone inscriptions have been a source of genealogical information for centuries. But modern technology has changed the way tombstones memorialize the dead. Gone are the days of name and dates chiseled laboriously by hand. Now, laser sculpting can create personalized tombstones that memorialize the interests of the deceased–including anything from marble motorcycles to granite garden tools.
Have you considered making a list of your 2003 New Year’s resolutions for your family history projects?
This is the time of year when it seems everyone is telling us what resolutions we need to make in order to improve our lives for the next year. You’ve undoubtedly noticed the magazine racks at the grocery store stating clever new ways to determine your best New Years resolutions.
Do you treasure a generations-old oral tradition that an ancestor of yours was born at sea while the family was immigrating to America? Or that an ancestor died at sea, never making it to the &qu ot;Promised Land?” Many American genealogists begin the search for an immigrant ancestor’s ship with rich family lore.
The five Mid-Atlantic states represent perhaps the most genealogically diverse region in the United States, yet significant commonalities in their history, record-keeping, settlement, and migrations, make it useful to consider research in these states together.